>
>Selon Tristan McLeay :
>>
>>> French requires the pronoun, though. Remember the Grandsirian
>>> reanalysis...
>>
>> French is polysynthetic nowadays?
>
>Quickly delurking again... :)
Welcome back, and (belated) congratulations!
I don't suppose you've had much time to do much conlanging lately -- your old
website doesn't seem to have been updated.
Judging from the types of comments made consistently by native Hexagonal
speakers, contemporary spoken French _must_ be a different language.
Jeff
>First I'd like to say it's nice not to be forgotten :) .
>
>Second, yes Tristan, *Spoken* French is a good example of a
>polysynthetic language (hidden by an out-of-date orthography as a
>synthetic language - although actually, I'd say French is really two
>languages, one spoken and one written, a bit like Classical and Vulgar
>Latin were very different, or like Standard Written Arabic vs. the
>various spoken Arabic languages/dialects, or katharevousa/dimothiki -).
>I don't have much time to explain my analysis in detail, but trust this
>good old native speaker who isn't brainwashed by the prescriptive
>grammatical establishment :) .
>
>If I find a moment, I'll be happy to substantiate my claim, but let's
>just summarise some quick points already:
>- Spoken French features verbal agreement with the three main
>participants of the sentence.
>- It features incorporation and suffixation of semantic items (like
>adjectives in the nominal phrase, and adverbs and nouns in the verbal
>phrase).
>- It features a rather free topic-comment-oriented word order.
>- Many of the so-called function words like articles and prepositions
>are best seen as prefixes.
>
>Those features are sometimes slightly disguised due to the strong
>prescriptive element of the French educational system in terms of French
>teaching, which forces elements of the written language into the spoken
>language, in the form of formality registers, with the more polite
>registers looking more like the written language (that includes the
>French language spoken on TV and in movies, which makes it in my ears
>often sound rather forced and unnatural), and the more familiar
>registers going more fully the polysynthetic way (this is not unlike the
>katharevousa/dimothiki duality Greek has suffered from). But Spoken
>French never goes as far as completely losing its polysynthetic form.
>
>OK, Gotta go now. If you want to know more I'll try and find some time
>to write a more complete post on this subject.
>--
>Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
>
>
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
>
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl
>
>You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.